Brewer's Rogues, Villains, Eccentrics: An A-Z of Roguish Britons Through the Ages by William Donaldson 659pp, Cassell, £20

Queuing, home ownership, evangelical Christianity, team games, hypocrisy, long walks in the rain, punk rock, boy scouts, the royal household, buying biographies, gardening, the common law, train-spotting, the pub: the character-building feats of English self-definition (which includes compiling lists thereof) may be endless but there is one category that subsumes and explains all the others. The English are meant to be eccentric. To be removed from the centre, quirkily brave in opinion, individualistically creative in behaviour, is a proud English boast in both the republic of letters and in the parliamentary monarchy of daily governed reality. Nobody does eccentricity better.

Indeed, lesser breeds without the humour may lack the tools for this particular job. In vain do the Spanish nominate Don Quixote or the French invoke Jacques Tati. Both may be odd - but the one is too metaphysical in his anguish and the other too disturbing in his mania to qualify. For the English eccentric is a comforter. Like satire, another English specialism, the insular eccentric offers not anger but a chortle as a means of accommodating oneself to absurdity, cruelty and iniquity. And that comfort is surely one of the few egalitarian consolations in a hierarchical society. Whether a proletarian pigeon-fancier on the allotment or an Emsworth-like breeder of pigs on broad acres, the English can console themselves with the thought that they're all in on this particular thing together.

Compulsive behavioural dis-order crowds the pages of William Donaldson's anthology - a work of maniacal genius. The cross-referencing alone displays a powerful talent for mischief. Such entries as: "Jesus, believing oneself to be having carnal relations with. See Edinburgh, Prince Philip, Duke of" and "Pygmy cannibals who were no match for English travelling women. See Carstairs, Marion Barbara; Kingsley, Mary", indicate the breadth of the anthologer's canvas. The author's particular strengths lie in mid-20th-century London gangland life and 18th- century low life. In the former field he displays an alarming degree of detailed scholarship. And while in the latter category the stories of absconding bishops in molly houses, of cross-dressers and boxers, may be familiar to the specialists in the field, it is useful to have them compiled in a single volume - where they may perhaps be consulted by after-dinner speakers such as Mellor, David (cross-referenced under "one-legged prostitute has sex with pizza delivery man").

A work that advertises itself as an A to Z of roguish Britons through the ages may indeed stretch the categories of "rogue", "villain" and "eccentric" beyond their accepted and useful uses. An account of the Embassy club has its place, for it was here that: "In the 1970s, waiters in hot pants served drinks on roller skates to elderly homosexuals and predatory thin women." But the entry for Nash, Jimmy (1930-), who ran the place in the 60s ("a man of negative values - he ate a pound of boiled sweets every day," recalled his captor, Commander Bert Wicksteed), is merely an excuse for a rather gleeful account of the number of stitches needed by two of the Nash gang's victims.

But even when straying into the wilder fringes of outright criminality, Donaldson's work is insistent in its Englishness. Naughty Welsh, Scots and Irish do get a look-in but as privileged participants in the derring-do of a naturally masterful race with their high spirits and lust for life.

In being so struck by the eccentric oddity of the English condition, Donaldson is part of a long tradition - but one with a clear enough starting point. Medieval England had its anchorites and hermits - people who were apart from the social world. But this was part of a wider European order, and before the 16th century there is no suggestion that the English thought of themselves as gifted in their otherness. The 18th century supplies the earliest entries in Donaldson's book of the strange. But he should have looked back to Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), whose Rabelaisian technique of piling up great lists of behavioural oddities anticipates his own methodology.

English eccentricity has often been a synonym for mere misanthropy - as can be seen in that other key text of the eccentric genre, John Aubrey's Brief Lives . For it was Aubrey who established in literary terms the English obsession with character and "personality" as the most enduring aspects of a person's legacy.

By the end of the 17th century it was accepted that there was such a thing as a unique English temperament. Its eccentricities involved a "sense of humour" as opposed to the continental aristocratic wit. It found situations, preferably involving the unmasking of pretensions, far funnier than the wit of word-play (although punning - as Shakespeare makes wearisomely obvious - had long since been chronically English). This temperament liked to tease people rather than to play with ideas. And it was markedly anti-heroic in both substance of behaviour and literary style. Falstaff's dismissal of honour as a mere word sets the trend here. English liter ary culture (saving only Milton's lonely eminence) has been anti-epic and cynic-friendly. Although good at Pope-ian pastiche and the subversive mock-epic, it has been suspicious of the grand style and its associated magnanimities of gesture. Which is why Phèdre is untranslatable into English.

"We have more humour," wrote the diplomat Sir William Temple in 1690, "because every man follows his own, and takes a pleasure, perhaps a pride, in showing it." The complacent pattern was set, and it associated English liberty with English difference. To be able to laugh as the rain fell on the verdant demi-Eden was a sign of freedom - something the uniformity of despotism abominated. L'exception anglaise had arrived. Poetry may make nothing happen but the English eccentric humour does not just survive in the valley of its making. It marches on, supposedly, to instruct as part of a wider story of liberty. John Wilkes's lampooning of institutions shows the political power of eccentricity - along with its witty barbs and ready ripostes: "How far," asked Mme de Pompadour of him, "does the liberty of the press extend in England?" "That is what I am trying to find out."

Something very odd - and perhaps deep - certainly happened to the English in the centuries between the Reformation and Quentin Crisp (sadly absent from this anthology). "There are those," writes De la Rochefoucauld, "who would never fall in love unless they had read about it first." The remark observes the pieties of an over-literary culture. But - applied to the idea of eccentric - it may well be true of the English. Because whether we come across it in Dickens or in Nancy Mitford, both of whose invented characters are "untranslatable" in the sense that they have minimal appeal in non-English-speaking countries, the idea of the English eccentric is a very literary construct. It is what the English have read about in books (such as Edith Sitwell's study of the subject) and then tried to imitate. And they have also seen it on stage. The English dramatic tradition has provided a model for its audiences - as well as for its own members off-stage.

The English eccentric is now a pretty rundown model. To be invited to meet a real "character" these days is to experience a sinking feeling as a crashing bore heaves into view displaying some feebly imitative tricks of speech and behaviour. Too many Soho drunks think they are Daniel Farson - and every Tory apes Winston Churchill.

There are some surprising omissions: Lady Hester Stanhope and Penelope Chetwynd should be included among women travellers. The cross-referencing on butlers ("disgraced bishops masquerading as", "indecently assaulted", "levitating" and "murderous") needs updating in the light of recent royal trials. That fine 18th-century Welsh antiquarian Iolo Morgannwg would have been cross at finding himself feminised as "Iola". But then an incapacity for foreign languages has long been a part of the eccentricity of the English.